Alibaba's Taobao and Mainland Tmall Sites Rank Nos

Home , Jack Ma, South China Morning Post, Taobao

Alibaba’s Taobao & the Creation of an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem CDC

Tarun Khanna September 10, 2017 © 2018 Tarun Khanna • Daily Show – http://www.cc.com/video-clips/zkwq3h/the-daily- show-with-jon-stewart-billion-dollar-baba • 60 Minutes – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZNvCDgfUA

• Visualization of website • Trustpass • Wangwang • Alipay

• (Yu Bao/ ultimately Ant Financial )

• Origin – Many SMEs have no way to evaluate the trustworthiness of their trading partners

• Jack Ma, in “Tech in Asia”, March 2013 – “In the U.S., e-commerce is what I call the dessert – it’s supplementary to the main business because the infrastructure for doing business is already so good. It is very difficult for e- commerce in the USA to grow, to develop, to surpass the traditional side of business. But in China, because the infrastructure of commerce is bad, e-commerce becomes the main course.”

• Jack Ma @ WEF, Davos 2015 – “For e-commerce, the most important thing is trust”

• Remember, Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759 • Markets cannot exists without fairness, altruism, and trust • Most decisions are made through a back-and- forth between ‘passions’ and an ‘impartial spectator’ (think long-term planner coupled with conscience)

• Taobao Villages – https://www.cnbc.com/video/2014/09/16/how- alibaba-helped-this-man-out-of-poverty.html

What problem is a Taobao Village trying to solve?

Credibility Enhancer

Information Analyzer

Aggregator

Adjudicator

zhāo cái jìn bǎo

© 2018 Tarun Khanna Costs of triggering Mistrust User reaction • Outrage from sellers in reaction to fees on priority listings (tens of thousands of negative messages) • Why – Hidden service, violates promise to be free – Technical issue with pay-for-performance contracts • Merchant misuse: bid hi on keywords, but then list products at hi prices. So buyers brought to website without paying fees

• Taobao asked their customers! – WangWang is key here • Benefit of communication with users – 60% voted against keyword pricing, especially small vendors; 40% voted for it, sellers pursuing differentiated offerings • So zhāo cái jìn bǎo discontinued

© 2018 Tarun Khanna New Monetization Model Taobao Mall • New B2C ‘Mall’ as solution – Established Vendors enter mall with a small fee – Smaller vendors can stay on traditional C2C platform • Remember that Wangwang gives information about how to target sellers appropriately

• Taobao breaks even six months about Tmall introduced

• Tmall – Browse and Shop for higher quality items (Olay face creams and Burbery coats) – Gross sales generated in qtr ending Sept 2015: $43 bn but growing faster than Taobao sales

• Focus on brand consciousness among increasingly well- off Chinese has led Alibaba to seemingly bet on Tmall going forward • Where do the brands come from? – Tmall Global links American brands to “digital China” (e.g. Costcos found it much easier to open a storefront on Tmall global than create its own site) © 2018 Tarun Khanna Emerging strengths and some vulnerabilities • Strengths – Mobile commerce. Taobao smartphone app dominated JD.com smartphone app 86%:5% – (1/3 of Alibaba’s orders come from smartphones) • Weaknesses – TMall has had mixed success. It has raised fees and lost some vendors even in mainland China • Traffic on Tmall Global is a fraction of that on Alibaba's other marketplaces: The site ranks No. 311 out of about 3,500 in terms of popularity in China, while Alibaba's Taobao and mainland Tmall sites rank Nos. 2 and 5 respectively – Taobao loses in several verticals to Dangdang in books and to JD.com in electronics

• Remember Amazon ultimately beat eBay. What about JD.com and Alibaba? (JD.com is following more of an Amazon model) • JD manages its inventory and logistics and can enforce quality much better, a ‘fact’ it has emphasized successfully in competing with Alibaba • JD.com: Taobao’s tolerance of counterfeits takes price competition to an extreme extent and chases away quality from China

For FY2017 in millions of U.S. dollars, except employees

Market Capitalization as Total Revenue Net Income of 12/31/2017 Employees Alphabet Inc. (Google) 110855.00 12662.00 729458.19 80110 Baidu, Inc. 13034.10 2812.64 81323.60 39343 Amazon.com, Inc. 177866.00 3033.00 563535.05 566000 Alibaba Group Holding Limited 22987.09 6343.22 442426.07 50097 Facebook, Inc. 40653.00 15934.00 512759.01 25105 Tencent Holdings Limited 36540.80 10990.21 489725.78 44796

Source: Standard & Poor's Capital IQ, accessed 8/29/2018

© 2018 Tarun Khanna The BAT Trio of the (mobile) internet • Baidu (think search and Google), Alibaba (think mobile commerce on internet, and Amazon) and Tencent (think social media and Facebook) are the ‘big 3’ traditionally staying in their own sandboxes • But emergence of mobile internet has caused them to rush into each other’s territories – Alibaba Group’s launch of Yu’e Bao, money market fund, caused Tencent and Baidu to follow suit – Similar land grab with entertainment content

© 2018 Tarun Khanna Alibaba and competition in financial services • Alibaba and Tencent own banks, insurers and wealth management products and have invested in on-demand services, so need access to mobile wallets • Ongoing clash in mobile payments

• Alipay morphs into Ant Financial

• Alibaba does NOT own Alipay, the controlling shareholder is Jack Ma (& colleagues). Alibaba gets 37.5% of profits of Alipay (~10% of Alibaba’s profits come from Alipay currently)

• Proposed IPO of Ant Financial delayed – Guesstimate of market value ~$100 billion

• Megalomania

• Governance

• “If banks do not change, let’s change the banks” …..to disrupt inefficient state-run banking system

– Fund launched by Alipay, Yu’e Bao, drew in $100 billion (maximal interest rate on 1-year term deposit in banking system 3.3%; with Yu’e Bao get double that and immediate access

– Banking arm MYBank competes with Tencent Holdings’ online bank WeBank

• Healthcare – Multi billion $ attempt to create an online pharmacy giant, and a Healthcare IT enterprise

• Another ‘small’ problem to tackle – Environmental degradation

• And if that isn’t enough, control over media? – Alibaba is “the biggest entertainment company in the world” because of millions spend time on its sites looking around – Purchase of video streaming, movie ticketing, crowdfunded film production, and buying Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post

• But New York has other ‘brakes’ on the ‘high speed’ governance – Short sellers – Aggressive Media (Jon Stewart show) – (Entrepreneurial) Lawyers and Litigious culture – Independent judiciary and prosecutors going after white crime recently • It’s the Ecosystem that matters

• China Raps Alibaba for Fakes --- Accusations of Lax Enforcement Date to Before Record IPO; Company Blasts Government – By Carlos Tejada 29 January 2015 The Wall Street Journal

• Since then, mutually conciliatory noises have resulted in a détente

• When Alibaba bought SCMP, Hong Kong press expressed dismany that it would compromise SCMP’s editorial independence since Alibab would ultimately be conciliatory to the CCP

• Can the CCP be complacent about an entity that engages directly with 500 million users? Open question …..

© 2018 Tarun Khanna Summary What is Alibaba’s BIG Innovation? • Overcoming institutional voids – “In the U.S., e-commerce is what I call the dessert – it’s supplementary to the main business because the infrastructure for doing business is already so good. It is very difficult for e-commerce in the USA to grow, to develop, to surpass the traditional side of business. But in China, because the infrastructure of commerce is bad, e-commerce becomes the main course.” (Jack Ma, in ‘Tech in Asia’ March 2013)

• How? Overcoming trust deficit in China • Alipay, Trustpass, Wangwang, Yu’e Bao

• Entrepreneurial Team led by Jack Ma

• Small business users, individual consumers

• Investors? – Unclear.

• But not an army of service providers – Migrant labor hired to deliver packages for example

How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression GARY KING Harvard University JENNIFER PAN Harvard University MARGARET E. ROBERTS Harvard University

We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt to and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 85 topic areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future—and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.

Abstract: Existing research on the extensive Chinese censorship organization uses observational methods with well-known limitations. We conducted the first large-scale experimental study of censorship by creating accounts on numerous social media sites, randomly submitting different texts, and observing from a worldwide network of computers which texts were censored and which were not. We also supplemented interviews with confidential sources by creating our own social media site, contracting with Chinese firms to install the same censoring technologies as existing sites, and— with their software, documentation, and even customer support—reverse-engineering how it all works. Our results offer rigorous support for the recent hypothesis that criticisms of the state, its leaders, and their policies are published, whereas posts about real-world events with collective action potential are censored.

Podcast http://c778316.r16.cf2.rackcdn.com/SciencePodcast_140822.mp3